Guess What? Less Than 1/3 Of You Are Going To Get To Keep Your Plan You Liked.....Whoops!

Here is the bottom line - Obamacare said over and over again that if you liked your current plan, you got to keep it, right? I know I am not the only one that heard him say that. We all know that we all heard him say that.

Here is the thing, though: the only way that you can ACTUALLY keep your plan is if you have a plan today that has not changed in any "significant" way - deductible, co-pay, benefits - otherwise, your plan becomes subject to the new Obamacare minimum coverage requirement, and if it does not meet those new minimum requirements, guess what? You don’t get to keep that plan after all.

Original estimates that were out while Obamacare was still saying that you could keep your plan stated that up to 67% of you were not going to get to keep your plan. Today's estimates are now stating that it could be as many as 80% of you who will get a policy cancellation notice within the first year of Obamacare.

It is what it is, and we are where we are now, but you have to admit that whole “you can keep your plan” line was a complete and total lie for over 2/3 of the people who were supposedly going to be able to keep their plan, and maybe even more people than that. Oh, and to make it worse, not only are you going to lose your plan, the plan that you have to buy instead is going to cost you up to twice as much. Welcome to Obamacare's America.

Oh, and for anyone who wants to brush this off as being the reporting of crazy right-wingers, here's an excerpt from an NBC investigation:

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”  

That means the Obamacare administration knew in July 2010 that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them. 

Yet President Obamacare, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms.

Taxation Without Representation Across Time

We continually hear from politicians and political commentators that they are worried about the debt and other problems that we are currently creating for future generations.

I was thinking today that while that is a valid concern, we ourselves are already part of a “future” generation that is saddled with the legislation of the past.

I didn’t vote to elect the people that passed the laws that enacted things like the income tax, social security, and medicare, yet I am impacted by those laws every other week when I send a nice chunk of the money I have worked for to the federal government to blow a good chunk of on stupid, wasteful spending.

The biggest problem with this is that I have no way to go back in time to see how things were before income tax, social security, and medicare were enacted.

Is the country a better place with these things in place? I’ll never know firsthand and for sure, will I? Well, at least not until one of us builds a time machine and starts selling tickets.

Just as I am sure that a baby born tomorrow will feel taxed without representation when they are forced to have healthcare coverage whether they like it or not when they roll off mommy and daddy's plan at the young age of 26, I sit here today, feeling that I was taxed without representation when the income tax, social security and medicare were passed long before I was born.